Status of SOAP and Python.

[David Bolen]

Gabriel Ambuehl <gabriel_ambuehl at buz.ch> writes:

> So what do you recommend to use instead of SOAP? XML-RPC? Classic RPC
> (*uaah*)?

I think it depends on what you need out of your RPC layer.  If I
recall correctly, SOAP certainly aims higher than XML-RPC in terms of
object invocation as opposed to simple RPC, so their can be advantages
there.  But that also introduces complexity.  Also, there's the
question of whether you really need compatibility with other
systems/languages.

We've used XML-RPC successfully for internal communication in a
scheduling system we use, but as it turned out over time, the system
remained soley Python, so the interoperability issue turned out not to
be one, and in retrospect having to work a bit around issues such as
not supporting None and dictionaries must use string keys could have
been unnecessary.  But it did certainly get things rolling quickly is
easy to use from Python.

For another remote site management tool, where information transferred
and transparency to upper level Python layers was most important (and
interoperability outside of Python wasn't), we just went to a simple
locally written RPC mechanism where the payload of the RPC was a
binary pickle compressed with zlib.  Works very well and can pass
anything the Python scripts on either side may need to deal with (we
haven't had to do any custom marshalling yet although that may happen
if we run into an object that won't serialize by default).

--
-- David
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